"The hard left"... you know what is so damn comical about this statement?

[woo me with science]

148. I wrote a post about this: the attempt to discredit the word, "authoritarian."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3171893

woo me with science (26,100 posts)
25. Ah, the attempt to discredit the term, "authoritarian." I predicted this OP.

I've seen this tactic in several posts lately and figured it would be used for an OP. Authoritarians don't like being called what they are, and since they can't yet prohibit words and restrict others to an approved Newspeak Dictionary, they settle for flailing at and attempting to discredit the individual words they dislike.

This tactic, used less slickly and more openly as elsewhere in this thread, is most amusing in one-to-one settings. When someone uses an accurate word to describe what you are doing or advocating, just put the word in quotation marks, add some exclamation points, and try to neutralize it by pretending it's an epithet instead of an accurate descriptor. We have all seen it here 1,000 times. A person's politics are described as Third Way, and he or she rears up in indignation, expressing shock at the "namecalling."

Well, no. "Third Way" means something. It is not an epithet, but rather descriptive shorthand for a clear and specific set of political values and policies. You can see what "Third Way" means by going to the Third Way website, where the goals and policies - liberal on the social issues unimportant to the One Percent but corporate and authoritarian on virtually everything else - are clearly delineated.

Those who embrace the policies don't want to admit it, so they try to make the term an epithet...something to be banned by a jury so that it can't be accurately applied to them on the forums. And now we are hearing the same sort of defensive attempts to discredit the word when authoritarianism is called "authoritarianism."

Of course "authoritarian" means something. Brazen defense of a government's spying on its own citizens is indisputably authoritarian.

I always picture an indignant poodle rearing up in outrage and exclaiming, "What?! You called me a DOG?!"

Orwell was right. Defending against authoritarianism *requires* defending language, because authoritarians will try to twist, discredit, or take away the words that are necessary for us to describe what is being done to us.